The new data center appears to be in Dublin, Ireland (making a trace route, the last identifyable hop is google.Dublin.cw.net). I think they've made the decision to build a data center there, when they announced the European headquarters. I wonder if they bring the Zurich data center back on line now.

First time since www-ab that somebody else but me reports a new data center... Fun to remember the times when posts reporting new data centers where edited at WebmasterWorld because of posting "secret" Google URLs. ;)

Dayo_UK, we're logging the DNS records for www.google.com every 5 minutes. When there is a new IP I can see it (216.239.59.99/104 has not been in our logs yet) and I run a script that digs all www-xx.

I made a page with all 676 links from aa to zz a few weeks ago and clicked through all of it. Nearly did it again a few nights ago, but ran out of time after forum 3 being a bit on the busy side again. Darn!

Most webservers have one or 2 IP addresses. But for Google it is somehow different. Google now uses 10 data centers. Any time you do a search on www.google.com your query is directed to one of these data centers. Preferable the one that is closest to you, but Google will do some load balancing to make sure that no data center is very busy while another data center has a lot of idle time. For some period (usually 5 minutes) the 'www.google.com' is translated in one IP address. During that time all queries go to that IP address belonging to one of the 10 data centers. After that time, you will get a new temporary IP address. As a user, you don't notice any difference, unless the data centers are giving different results. That used to be once a month for a few days during the 'Google Dance'. During those days the results were different for the same query on the various data centers. As a result, your page went up and down in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) for a given query; the page was dancing.

Because whenever i view google.co.in or google.co.jp etc They are routed to 216.239.35/37/39.100

while google.com is routed to 216.239.51/53.100

I'm in Japan and a few minutes ago I pinged www.google.co.jp, www.google.com and www.google.co.in and all three gave 216.239.33.99 and so did Google France, Denmark, Netherlands, etc. If I do it now, all of them resolve in the 216.239.57.99 IP address.

At this moment not all 10 data centers are really in use. Already for some time sj and zu are redirecting to another data center (e.g. if you click on 'cached' in a SERP, you will see page from a different data center). The new one (gv) is maybe not yet used right now. So you will just get semi-random one of the 7 active data centers.

When you query www your answer comes from any one of the ten datacentres.

They used to be all identical, except for a short period each month where one would be updated with new information. This caused the SERPs to vary from one search to the next depending on whether you got old or new data returned. That new information would then spread to all of the other datcentres over a few days.

Google is moving to a more continuous update but you can still see that the various datacentres are slightly different to each other all of the time now.